Indonesia has experienced six insurgencies since it declared independence in 1945. Of these insurgencies, three were resolved through negotiations. There is great variation in the manner the negotiations occurred. The state ...

This dissertation focuses on the challenges of making inferences from observational data in the social sciences, with particular application to situations of violent conflict. The first essay utilizes quasi-experimental ...

Abortion is a loaded, controversial, and divisive sociocultural and political term, concept, and debate. Yet little empirical research has been conducted to examine what effects abortion rights legislation and court cases ...

Where and how does innovation take place in contemporary high-technology sectors? Theories of innovation presume a division of labor between firms in industrialized economies that invent and commercialize new technologies ...

Violent non-state actors have consistently served as a destabilizing force within the international system. These groups create a base within a state's sovereign territory, the "base state," and utilize this platform to ...

My dissertation reexamines the relationship between religious and political attitudes and challenges the conventional wisdom that religious identities are impervious to politics' influence. I not only identify the conditions ...

What if the United States had led its NATO allies to intervene in Syria's civil war in the midst of calls for humanitarian intervention in mid-2012? Despite the importance of this question for the study and evaluation of ...

This thesis examines the relationship between public opinion and the way senators vote on specific issues, and how this "responsiveness" might vary across income groups. The independent variable of interest, state-level ...

What are the conditions under which local actors are more likely to carry out policy innovations that produce environmental or social benefits in local China? Previous studies on "Chinese experimentalism" suggest that local ...

In democracies, the public make decisions that affect policy. In some situations, these decisions are only indirectly related to policy: voters choose an elected executive, who then appoints an unelected policy-maker, who ...

Contrary to longstanding of predictions of nuclear tipping points, the number of states interested in nuclear weapons has sharply declined in recent decades. In contrast to existing explanations, this dissertation argues ...

States respond to rebellion differently, often shaping the intensity, duration, and outcome of the conflict as well as prospects for stability and state consolidation. Puzzling cross-national variation in counterinsurgen ...

After ten years of planning and pre-development, the Chinese government approved the space station project on September 25, 2010. In October 2010, the People's Republic of China (PRC) officially announced its independent ...

Development scholars, heavily influenced by the cases of the four Asian Tigers (Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan), have attributed success in economic development to education. Although the Philippines seemed ...

The meltdown of Fukushima Daiichi's nuclear plant was one of three disasters that rocked Japan on 11 March 2011, a day often referred to as "3.11." This nuclear accident led to increased attention to and disapproval of ...

When and how do public institutions work effectively on behalf of marginalized citizens? The Indian government has enacted a number of policies for universal primary education, and yet the extent and quality of implementation ...

Excessive sodium consumption is both prevalent and very costly in many countries around the world. Recent research has found that more than 90% of the world's adult population live in countries with mean intakes exceeding ...

A new model concerning the concepts of host nation security force development, or security sector reform (SSR), is proposed. This model is rooted in scholarly literature and seeks to fill current gaps in United States Army ...